Heroes & Extremists
A home-brew TTRPG manual formatted in Homebrewery
Overview
What is
heroes & extremists?
Heroes & Extremists is a homemade or "home-brew" Tabletop-Role-Playing Game (TTRPG) manual formatted in the software, Homebrewery. The manual includes a general overview and guide to the gameplay including core systems, character creation, combat, and how to make your own adventure using the rules and established worldbuilding. The main narrative of Heroes & Extremists is that the players can roleplay as heroic characters in the era of Pulp Heroism.
What is "pulp heroism"?
"Pulp Heroism" refers to the term used to describe a type of fictional hero that came to life during the early 20th century through what were called "Pulp Magazines". The word “pulp” commonly refers to “inexpensive” or “mass produced” comic books that lacked quality literature, hence why they were able to be mass-produced to the public.
In the present day, “pulp” is commonly defined as high-action/adventure, larger-than-life heroes, villains who are dramatically evil, and countless, nameless goons. Some examples of these “pulp heroes” would include Indiana Jones, The Rocketeer, Zorro, The Green Hornet, Conan the Barbarian, John Carter of Mars, and The Shadow.
DEVELOPMENT
Research & planning
One of the first aspects I needed to prioritize during development was research on the topics of Pulp Heroism. You see, the main reason I decided to make this TTRPG have the theme of Pulp Heroes was because I had recently watched The Rocketeer fell in love with the concept of heroes who don't any or much superpowers, and are just ordinary people with some kind of gimmick to them.
Anyways, I conducted this research by watching a handful of the other pulp hero films that had been released in the past few decades like Conan the Barbarian, Darkman, Dick Tracy, and The Green Hornet. Beyond watching the films, I did general research by looking up wiki sources that provided more info on the pulp heroes I wanted to have as influence when creating the manual.
Planning character classes
With the research, I began compiling heroes into a roster where I categorized each hero to a different type of class, as seen below:
Each class is meant to function similarly to the standard "class archetypes" found in popular TTRPGs like D&D 5e, those being the Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, and Rogue. Slugger represents the "Fighter" class, so I wanted heroes that tend to take more hits than dish them to represent that archetype, hence why Indiana Jones and the Rocketeer are associated with that class. The same logic applies to every other class, Gadget-Goo = Rogue, Spectre = Wizard, Socialite = Cleric. The other two classes, Duelist and Sidekick, didn't make it into full production.
Additional planning documents
Since this was a class project, there were assignments given to us that helped us plan for our TTRPG manuals. Using them, I was able to brainstorm ideas for Heroes & Extremists like Worldbuilding, Character Classes, Systems, etc. Below are PDFs of what I planned and turned in.
oops! still working on this page!
